Wilderness and Species Conservation

Wild areas, and the wildlife that lives in them, are increasingly under threat across Canada, from industrial resource extraction, climate change and development pressures. While early settlers in Canada wrote of eking out existences in our vast wilderness areas, today almost half of these natural areas have been degraded, fragmented and impaired by industrial use or out rightly converted to cities, towns and farms.

One means of protecting our remaining wild spaces and wildlife is by creating protected areas, at federal and provincial levels. However, although protected areas do often offer wilderness areas a reprieve from the onslaught of development and industrial use, they also raise numerous conservation challenges.

Inside some protected areas, the success of the management commitment to prioritize the protection of ecological integrity is highly questionable; conservationists are working in many areas to keep industrial and commercial operations from...